Sign in for a personalized experience.
Travel
Living
A-Z
Forum
Friends
Jobs
Shopping
japan-shop.com
Related Pages
Language
Computer

Search Engines
Kanji
Hiragana
Katakana

Related Questions
What are these symbols?
 3 reactions, last updated 63 days ago
Question about computer
 1 reaction, last updated 91 days ago

Survey
How would you rate your experiences staying at Japanese hotels/ryokan?
Very good
Good
Neither good nor bad
Bad
Very bad
Never stayed at one
see results
Other Surveys:
Budget for ryokan stay
Next trip to Japan
Improvements to Tourism
Financial Crisis
Ski Destination
Preferred way to stay at a ryokan
Purpose of visit
Most popular region
Have you recently entered Japan?

japan-guide.com newsletter
Keeping you up to date on Japan travel and living related issues and site updates. Click here to subscribe!

Sponsored Listings
Tour Packages
Guided and individual tour plans.
Car Rental
The cheapest rates in Japan!
Japan - Order FREE Brochure!
About vacation plans and specialty travel.

Home - Computer and Internet

Japanese keyboard

Japanese keyboards

Japanese keyboards look very similar to English keyboards with just a few differences. Letters and numbers are arranged in the same way, and English keyboards can be used to input Japanese text.

The most common input method is to enter Japanese words in their romanized writing (for example: "toukyou" for Tokyo). The input will be automatically converted into hiragana as you write, and can then be switched to corresponding kanji by pressing the space key.

Japanese on non-Japanese operating systems

Most modern operating systems, including Windows XP, Windows Vista and newer versions of Mac OS include Japanese language support.

Japanese text on websites and in simple documents should be supported even without installing any aditional software. In order to set up your computer to handle Japanese input, the "Date, Time, Language and Regional Settings" control panel (or similar) in the preference settings can be used.

Older operating systems, however, do not have built-in Japanese language support and require the installment of a separate Japanese language software for displaying and inputting Japanese characters.

English Links
A complete introduction to Japanese character encodings
By Alexandre Elias.

Asian-inspired
living room furniture
Copyright © 1996-2009 japan-guide.com All rights reserved - Last Page Update: May 31, 2008
home - site map - privacy policy - terms of use - contact - L‚ɂ‚¢‚Ä - advertising